What the Ruth Institute is most proud of and thankful for this year is the accomplishments of our “It Takes a Family to Raise a Village” (ITAF) leadership conference graduates. We have several we’d like to feature for you today. Check out what these students, emboldened by their experience with the Ruth Institute, have gone on to accomplish on their campuses.Read more…

The Ruth Institute inspires and equips the Survivors of the Sexual Revolution to recover from their negative experiences and reach out to help the young. We move people from being Victims to Survivors to Advocates for positive change.

Yesterday, I posted a story about the Census Bureau dropping questions about marriage, as well as a sample email you can send to object to this development. I also posted this background information, in case you want more information before you send an email.

You may wonder then, why the Ruth Institute cares about the questions the Census Bureau asks about marital status.

Three reasons.

First, I want to call to your attention this fact: the Sexual Revolution has been victimizing people for 50 years or so. How is this possible? By suppressing the harms caused by sexual license. Each person believes their own personal story is unique, and that any sadness, loneliness, loss or grief they experience is unique to them, and perhaps even, their own fault. Connecting the dots between the pain and the Sexual Revolution would be the beginning of the end of this destructive ideology.

Second and closely related: failing to ask the right questions can be a method of suppressing information. Conversely, asking the right questions is crucial to getting the right answers.

I do not really know the intentions of the individuals in the Census Bureau who are contemplating the removal of questions about change in marital status.

I can tell you these facts:

Women are more likely to be murdered by their cohabiting boyfriends than by their husbands.

Children are at significantly greater risk for fatal child abuse from their mother’s cohabiting boyfriend, than from their biological parents married to each other.

Second marriages are more likely to end in divorce than first marriages.

Most divorces do not involve domestic violence.

We only know this information because someone asked the questions. And typically the “someone” who asked, was NOT the government. Researchers quite often have to piece the information together from multiple sources. I can hardly believe this is entirely an accident. I say this, without meaning any disrespect or without meaning to cast aspersions on the motives of everyone involved in data collection within our various levels of government.

Finally, I am a nerd at heart. Data is important to me. I cut my teeth on social science research, specifically in economics. I love the stuff. In my heart, I want us to get the facts right, and respect the integrity of the data.

Dropping important questions from the Census simply cannot be a good thing. Send a note to Jennifer Jessup and tell her your concerns. jjessup@doc.gov But don’t delay. Comments close on December 30, 2014 .

I am concerned that the Census is considering removing the questions about changes in marital status in future American Community Surveys. Marriage is different from other relationships. The recent trends in marriage show that the institution is in decline. If you quit asking the questions, you will not be able to detect such trends.

As a taxpaying citizen, I insist that you continue to monitor the state of marriage by asking questions 21a-21c and questions 22 and 23. If the Census has the time and resources to ask people about their plumbing and their internet use, you can certainly ask a few questions about change in marital status.

Removing these questions is symbolic of the government’s attack on the institution of marriage. I deeply resent the idea that the federal government does not consider these questions worthy of attention. I hope you will continue to include these questions.

In a previous post, I described the Census Bureau’s proposal to eliminate questions about changes in marital status from future data collections. This post provides you with more detail, so you can examine this issue for yourself.

Go here for more information about the specific questions they are proposing to drop.

Go here for more information about the census itself. Scroll down to page 97 for their explanation of the questions they propose to omit, starting in 2016.

If you scroll through this document, you will see that this American Community Survey asks questions about these issues. I suggest you choose a few to mention in your letter to Ms. Jessup, as I have done.

Whether the person moved in the last year

Race

Ancestry

Plumbing

Internet use, broadband or DSL?

Type of computer, laptop or desktop?

Number of cars in the household

Type of fuel used to heat the house

How much people pay for their utilities, insurance and mortgage

In my email to Ms. Jessup, I mentioned plumbing and internet use. You can mix it up a bit in your email.

Thank you for writing this email!! If we all send an email, and ask 2 friends to do the same, Ms. Jessup may have a surprise in her in-box in a few days!

The US Census Bureau is in the process of removing questions about marriage from its surveys. According to the Washington Examiner:

Members of Congress and agencies rely on demographic data to shape policy. Marriage has been declining, and the presence of single mothers is among the largest factors in the growth of entitlement programs.

But the government soon may have no idea how marriage is changing in America and how it is linked to the well-being of children and adults. The American Community Survey is sent yearly to a small fraction of Americans and goes into more detail than the once-every-ten-years Census, which sticks to basics and to which all Americans must respond.

Removing questions about marriage from the Census is a small step, taken by technocrats inside a relatively innocuous government agency. The totalitarian masters in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 systematically removed words from the language. Controlling language, controls our thought.

Without the proper words, we will have trouble forming precise concepts in our minds. Marriage matters. A tremendous amount of social science research shows that “marriage” really is more than a piece of paper. If we quit asking people questions about marriage, divorce, remarriage and the like, all sexual coupling will be blurred together under the heading of “intimate partners” or “roommates.” We will not have the information we need to even ask whether marriage matters.

For the past fifty years or so, the Elites of our country have been engaged in a long-term battle to deconstruct the family. They do not wish for the marriage of your mother and father to be the source of your identity, your sustenance and your education. They resent the idea that the particular members of your family should be the object of your gratitude and your loyalty.

In other words, the State wishes to crush the family because the State resents the competition.

Did I mention that the comment period closes on December 30, 2014? They are seriously not expecting you or I to notice what they are about to do, over a holiday.

Shall we surprise them? Write to the Jennifer Jessup, the bureaucrat who is in charge of handling the “requests for comments.” She, no doubt, expects to hear only from her fellow technocrats in other federal agencies about whether they will be inconvenienced by dropping these questions. She probably is not expecting to hear from outraged citizens about the blatant attempt to manipulate reality. Surprise her. Her e-mail is jjessup@doc.gov

Christmas is the saddest time of the year in which to feel lonely. We can feel alone in a crowded room, when we feel no one really knows or understands us. We can feel alone because we literally have no one around us. There are so many reasons today why people are estranged from their families. Christmas loneliness may be one of the great unsung stories of our time.

The girls were looking at their baby albums. My middle daughter, the most dramatic of the bunch by far, announced in a grandiose voice, “It’s time for the tale of the babies! Part One: Baby Gemma grows up!”

Also while looking at their pictures they saw their favorite stuffed animals when they were brand new. “Look how young Momma Bear and Ribbity are! Momma Bear was so fluffy back then.” I couldn’t help but laugh. They sounded like me when I look at pictures of my husband and myself from long ago. We were both much fluffier then.

I was talking to Dr. Morse yesterday, and asked her to think back to when she was a young girl in school. “How many kids were from divorced families?” I asked her. She said she could think of one. The rest lived with their married biological parents. Before the Sexual Revolution, there used to be an important and unrecognized equality among children: nearly every child lived with his/her married parents.

Let’s think for a moment about what the Sexual Revolution has done to equality from the child’s point of view. In the name of adult sexual liberation, we now have a tremendous amount of family/structural inequality among children. Some kids live with their married parents, and many do not:

A superstition is something we believe in spite of the evidence, because we like the way it makes us feel.

For example: “I can solve all my problems if I could just divorce my spouse, and try again to find the Perfect Soulmate.”

Do you remember the movie, Four Christmases, the Reese Witherspoon, Vince Vaughn Christmas movie from 2008? The premise of this movie is that Reese and Vince have 4 Christmases: one with each one of their divorced and remarried parents. I wrote a column about this film when it came out.

Popular culture has a way of reflecting the anxieties and ambiguities of our age, sometimes without quite meaning to. Christmas 2008’s bit of holiday eye candy, Four Christmases, illustrates the anxiety around insecure relationships, across the generations. The title comes from the visits that a happily unmarried yuppie couple must make to their two sets of divorced parents. But the movie could be called The Superstitions of Divorce. It strips away the lies we tell ourselves to justify our rejection of one another….

Not a one of these first three parents has learned a thing from their divorces. Boyfriend and Girlfriend are not deceived by their parents’ efforts to absolve themselves: They still have the same problems and crazy behavior. The new love interest doesn’t solve their problems.

Another superstition: “The kids will be fine as long as their parents are happy. Kids are resilient.”

Social science can now tell us for certain that this is untrue, as can millions of children of divorce who are now old enough to speak for Read more…